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Blaming ‘Media Hype’ for Swine Flu Fears

By Robert Mackey May 1, 2009 12:12 pmMay 1, 2009 12:12 pm

Warnings by public health officials this week that the spread of a new strain of H1N1 swine flu meant that a global pandemic was “imminent” were followed by the clarification that the word pandemic will be used “even if the new virus turns out to cause mainly mild symptoms.” The situation presented the world’s news media with a conundrum: How loudly should a responsible person shout (or whisper) “Possible Fire!” in a crowded theater?

The question has been easy to answer for broadcasters, Web sites and newspapers that see the world in tabloid terms. In London, the free commuter newspaper Metro started its coverage on Sunday with the headline “Swine flu ‘could kill up to 120m’,” over a picture of Mexican police with masks and machine guns.

Likewise, no one has been shocked that many anchors on 24-hour-a-day cable news channels, which have a lot of time to fill, have spent a good deal of it hyperventilating. These days, that is to be expected — after all, Jon Stewart makes a very good living pointing out night after night that those channels tend to overreact at some stage to almost every crisis they report. That’s what they do.

Then you have public health officials around the world who are trying to stress that people should be prepared for an emergency, even if one never materializes. To continue the metaphor, they are just whispering loudly, “Make sure the theater has fire extinguishers!”

As Monica Davey reports in today’s New York Times, a result of all this is that many non-experts in influenza have found this week’s media coverage of the H1N1 swine flu virus confusing, if not infuriating. Ms. Davey found that many Americans were engaged in the balancing act of trying to stay informed about the dangers without getting carried away by fear — and as they did, some people she spoke to “complained bitterly about the news media’s ‘over-hyping’ of the matter.”

Several readers of The Lede have posted comments echoing that sentiment. Now that news cycles have sped up the rate at which information spreads, it also seems to have sped up the rate at which people become overloaded with information — and then blame the news media for not doing a better job of communicating clearly the exact risks posed by threats like potential flu pandemics or brewing hurricanes.

On Thursday, for instance, a reader named Carl N. wrote a comment on this blog:

I don’t get it. Why are we so worried? Every winter influenza takes tens of thousands of lives! Does the media realize this? Why are they acting like every single (even nonfatal) case means we are about to hit by the bubonic plague?

Why is this flu getting so much attention? Other than the severe pocket in Mexico, it doesn’t seem to be more deadly than the “regular” flu. And even the Mexican statistics are still rolling in, so can we be sure it’s even that bad there? Does this flu’s rate of transmission somehow correlate with an ability to mutate into something worse? Are the C.D.C. and W.H.O. really just practicing for something worse? The amount of panic weighed against the actual numbers is very off kilter.

So, with the blame-the-media reaction in full flow, some parts of the media sprang into action by trying to jump on the anti-media bandwagon. Ben Goldacre, a British doctor who writes — in columns, blog and books — about the perils of what he calls “Bad Science,” pointed out in an article for The Guardian on Thursday that at least some media outlets were trying to get in on the backlash against the media’s coverage of the swine flu outbreak.

Dr. Goldacre began by defending the media’s coverage of what still could be the very early stages of a serious outbreak: “Everyone is just saying: we don’t know, it could be bad, and the newspapers are reporting that. Sure, there’s a bit of vaudeville in the headlines, but they’re not saying things that are wrong.” Then he detailed the calls he received from various media outlets that, incorrectly, expected him to appear on their programs to say that the media was making too much of the threat posed by swine flu:

By Tuesday, pundit-seekers from the media were suddenly contacting me, a massive nobody, to say that swine flu is all nonsense and hype, like some kind of blind, automated naysaying device. “Will you come and talk about the media overhyping swine flu?” asked Case Notes on Radio 4. No. “We need someone to say it’s all been overhyped,” said BBC Wales. […]

In the time that I have been writing this piece – no embellishment – I’ve had similar calls off This Week at the BBC (“Is the coverage misleading?”), Al-Jazeera English (“We wanted to talk to someone on the other side, you know, challenging the fear factor”), the Richard Bacon Show on Five Live (“Is it another media scare like Sars and bird flu?”) and many more.

I’m not showing off. I know I’m a D-list public intellectual, but I just think it’s interesting: because not only have the public lost all faith in the media; not only do so many people assume, now, that they are being misled; but more than that, the media themselves have lost all confidence in their own ability to give us the facts.

In his article, and in a subsequent audio interview with The Guardian, Dr. Goldacre argues that the problem is that besides now not trusting the media — which has perhaps cried wolf one, or 7,000 times too often in recent years — the public in general is “poorly equipped to think around issues involving risk.” While, as he says “infectious diseases epidemiology is a tricky business: the error margins on the models are wide, and it’s extremely hard to make clear predictions,” the demand from many media consumers seems to be: ‘Tell us exactly what is going to happen and how bad it will be.’

In response to the suggestion that current reporting on the risk of a dangerous swine flu pandemic might later seem to be as unnecessary as earlier reporting on the grave risk of pandemic outbreaks of SARS or bird flu, Dr. Goldacre says, simply: “They were risks, risks that didn’t materialise, but they were still risks. That’s what a risk is. I’ve never been hit by a car, but it’s not idiotic to think about it.”

So what is the answer for confused media consumers in an era of 24/7 television and Internet coverage? Possibly it is just this: first, people may need to abandon their hope that the many, many voices that make up the world’s media today will suddenly start singing as a chorus, and figure out which of those many voices seem to regularly deliver credible information. Then, as Dr. Goldacre advises, we may all have to accept that disease forecasting — like weather forecasting — is more of a guide to what might happen that a certain prediction of what will happen.

The analogy that might be most useful in thinking about the “boy who cried wolf” problem is what happened before Hurricane Katrina: Many people simply refused to believe, after years of warnings about hurricanes that turned out to be less than apocalyptic, that there was any need to evacuate the city. That’s not to say that every disease outbreak will turn into a dangerous pandemic, any more than every storm will turn into a Katrina-sized emergency — but keeping an eye on the weather forecast is still a good idea.

media hype?
for pete’s sake, what about the “enflamer in chief”, vice president biden?

will someone become a reporter instead of a “hyper” and tell us how many “regular” flu cases have been reported in the areas where swine flu has been found?

that would be a good statistic for people know in order to make an informed decision on how to change their habits, if at all.
[PG, Thanks. The specific information you request — the number of people killed each year in the United States by seasonal flu (36,000) — has been reported this week on this blog, here, and in an article on this Web site, here. In the current over-saturated media environment, readers may need to use their ability to search out information already available on news Web sites, rather than expect bulletins to deliver exactly the information they want or need. — RM, Lede Blog]

The danger that most people don’t see/believe is virus mutation. When a virus spreads to different populations, it may mutate to adapt different human bodies and become very deadly. Since people are generally reluctant to change their ways of living, most tend to ignore this until too late, as shown in the past.

The reason SARS didnt’ become a huge outbreak is precisely BECAUSE there was massive awereness which led to containment of the virus which quickly made it dissappear. If the media hadn’t written about it and informed the public, it could and would have spread a lot more. Information is power. Be thankful that we live in a democracy where many voices are heard.

I agree with Martin Barnes. What’s not lethal now can be in the future. If it settles into the immune system…secretly developing itself, when you go to get the flu vaccine it can interact and become devastating.

In the most densely populated times the world has ever seen globally, one minor slip-up could be catastrophic. Not to panic over it, this happens repeatedly in history…No point in glooming over what inevitably occurs, casualities.

I live in Monterrey, Mexico and the world media hasn’t realized the brutal effect that they have done to the Mexican economy. So far only 12 people have died from this flu, 12 PEOPLE!! Seasonal flu kills more than 30,000 a year. I think the United States and the world should be more concerned on the economic consecuences that this media hype will have on the social structures in Mexico. It’s seems amazing that as of today there hasn’t been any cases in Cancun, Playa del Carmen, Puerto Vallarta, Cabo San Lucas and all of the sudden everybody is canceling their trips and panicking because of the “deadly virus”. This will have grave results for an struggling economy.

Isn’t reporting on “media hype” just as bad as the hype itself? Both encourage people to take extreme positions. The “media hype” angle encourages people to do nothing (which could end up being the right choice or could be disastrous) while the hype angle encourages people to take extreme action (which could have major economic impacts or could save your life). Neither encourages trust of the media.

I do disagree with the attitude “Sure, there’s a bit of vaudeville in the headlines”. I think people take a lot of the tone from the headlines, which means emotional impact. If the headline shocks and terrorizes, how much comfort do you really receive by reading an article that, perhaps halfway through, admits the level of doubt? The reader is primed for panic by the headline. It’s irresponsible and the headlines should be held to the same high standard as the content.

I also disagree with the attitude that leads to “We need someone to say it’s all been overhyped”. That is about as far from responsible reporting as you can get.

Better careful than dead. Purelling your hands and being conscious about what you touch when you are outside for a few weeks seems like a small price to pay. Yeah, this thing could fizzle at least for the moment (summer is almost upon us), but the situation is fluid and developing, and the high numbers of deaths in Mexico suggest that caution is warranted.

While this seems like a mildly interesting post, it makes no mention of why scientists are apt to think that this virus has the potential to be pandemic or even what the term pandemic means.
This virus is a H1N1 (hemaglutanin and neuraminidase) virus that has borrowed genes, through recombination, from pig, birds, and humans. As a species we have no background immunity against this virus; thus if exposed, the likelihood of infection taking hold is high. This does not indicate whether or not the strain is likely to be highly virulent or not, insofar as severity of medical indications go, but is a mere reflection of the susceptability of the population as a whole: thus the term pandemic. That being said, it is likely that there will be comparatively more deaths caused by this flu, even if average virulence is low, just due to the high number of people who are susceptible to it.

The thing is, there have been real flu pandemics in the past, and they were truly awful. So anytime a new strain seems to be highly contagious, there is legitimate cause for alarm, even if current death rates seem to be low.

Remember too, that the pattern of the pandemic in the 1950s was that it diminished during the summer and then returned with a vengeance in the fall, so those who are remarking that since summer is coming, we’re in the clear are ignorant.

As long as the media attention is designed to promote awareness rather than fear, all of the news stories will be helpful. Containing recent problems (SARS, avian flu) depended on quick action and this instance hopefully will be similar.

True, but that gets more and more difficult to do because there are hardly any slant-free media from which to get the report. If I’m keeping an eye on a weather forecast that does nothing but wave hurricane flags on the screen, it’ll have an impact on how I look at the sky, no matter how much the report just wants to signify a cloudy day.

Everyone knows that the 24-hour stations breed fear because it attracts viewers. It also steals away our common sense and our intuition. H1-N1 swine flu is a cause for concern, but if everyone just keeps calm and uses common sense (taking care of themselves, staying home if sick, washing hands frequently, getting care if you do have the virus), things will be fine.

Frankly, I’m more scared of the swine flu not because of what it’ll do to me physically, but financially, because I’m one of the millions in this country with no health insurance – and meds to fight this virus, I’m sure, do not come cheap.

The lesson to the public – which will not likely be learned- is to read beyond the headlines, check various sources, act with caution, not fear. And while you’re at it, wash your hands for 20-30 seconds.

WHO and CDC are both good sources. I find the NYTimes good- once beyond the headlines. Reporters, no matter how reasoned their stories, don’t do the heads. If I were to ‘blame media’, I would look at the local stations that are all flash and dazzle/blood and guts- and if that’s you’re only news source, heaven help you.

Because this is a brand new virus no one has any immunity to it. That means that when we’re exposed we’re likely to get sick. To be sure, most of us won’t get that sick, but the more people who get sick the more likely there will be deaths.

You can sit there and say “Well in any given flu season 35,000 people die” but that is in a regular flu season where huge percentages of the population has built in immunity.

In this case, because it’s a new virus, there is the potential for many millions more to become ill vastly increasing the deaths. Sure, those deaths may be among the elderly and infants, but if that old person is your mother or that infant is your baby it’s a lot less academic, isn’t it? More people sick=more dealths.

The goal is to drastically reduce the number of people who get sick so they don’t infect those who are extra vulnerable.

BTW, I am so tired of people who say “but it’s just the flu.” I’ve had regular old fashioned seasonal influenza and let me tell you I never want to feel that bad again. I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. My hair even hurt. I got exhausted walking from the bed to the bathroom. I was too sick to stand in the shower. I was acutely ill for a week but it was THREE MONTHS before I felt healthy again. I got bronchitis (and I never get chest colds), I routinely went to bed at 7 p.m. because I was too tired to keep my head up. And I was a young healthy person.

Just imagine how damaging it will be if even 20 percent of the population gets that sick.

Why aren’t there these fears during a normal flu season? Because the media isn’t fanning the flames, but they are now. Why are you in the media causing a panic? This is not the 1918 flu. Why are you releasing news that seems designed to freak people out? Is there nothing else to talk about?

Maybe those of us who are calling BS on the media are not — as Dr. Goldacre and indeed the Lede seem to be suggesting — demanding that the media prognosticate with 100% accuracy. Maybe what we’re in fact demanding is that the media greatly back off on prognostication, while abridging their reporting of what IS happening.

When the lede for the story about the Fort Worth schools system begins “Fort Worth became the nation’s first major city school district to close…” right away they’re suggesting “…and there will be many more to come. Just the beginning, folks! Stay tuned right here for more info!”

Sure, many of the stories that begin with the fear will eventually, by the 3rd paragraph or later, mention that “much is uncertain” but let’s not kid ourselves about journalistic objectivity here. The lede was “Be afraid! Be very, very afraid!” And even those stories are often leaving out the stats or other context (hey, nobody’s definition of “pandemic” means we’re all going to die!).

SARS was not media hype; ask the people in Hong Kong. This is a perfect example of the prevention paradox: If you prevent something disastrous from happening, then people won’t see the consequences and think you overhyped the threat.
The concern over H1N1 isn’t its lethality now, but that (being a novel strain) it could mutate into something a lot more lethal. Really people, it’s not that complicated.
The real problem is the poor state of scientific education in this country, including biology and by extension infectious disease. That’s what will help people accurately gauge risks when (as eloquently stated in the article) there are no clear answers or predictions in a situation. And yes, you can’t teach that without introducing evolutionary concepts, though they are far different than Dawkins’ “God is a delusion!” idiodicy. But that’s another story…

This column misquotes the legal opinion ..The issue is not ‘shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater..It is FALSELY shouting “fire” in a crowded theater that is a crime, , if one were to look back and actually read the opinion. There is a flu, not a fire ; the flu is real. Precautions are wise. 24 hour a day hyping as if this were the only story on Earth is not wise or advisable, in my opinion. I am a health care provider working with chiildren who need treatment. Parents are cancelling at our clinic becasue of “swine flu”….”Just to be on the safe side.” It’s ridiculous!

As a resident in the US with family in Mexico City, it is alarming to see the culture of fear that has driven many Americans surrounding the Swine Flu media story.

Mexico city holds a population of 20,000 million people with only 13 deaths currently being reported associated to Swine Flu. The precautions the Mexican goverment has implemented in the city to control the further spread of Swine should be considered in the context of the city. The highly dense population exiting in Mexico city contributes to a different social interaction of its citizens on a day to day basis. Unlike many places in the US where contact with strangers, neighbors, heck even family is extremely limited, Mexico City operates differently with a higher volume of contact with the general population during the course of a normal day.

Breaking this down to just a few simple tasks, the following examples will hopefully shine some light on the point. In the US, when you go to pump gas in your car, this activity normally requires no additional contact with another individual especially if you pay at the pump using a debit car and/or credit car. In Mexico City, pumping gas typically is done through service by a person or a couple of individuals employed by the gas station to complete the transaction. Parking a car on the street usual involves interaction with a stranger looking out for your car or requiring a fee to be paid to a person rather then a machine.

This is just some very simple tasks that hopefully can demonstrate how interaction in Mexico City is much different then how it exists in the US.

Spreading the flu in a higher dense population where interaction with a general population is much more likely should be taken into account when analyzing the precaution Mexico City has implemented in the city to stop the spread of Swine. Americans should consider this point when evaluating or speculating on the actions taken by Mexico City to control Swine and refrain from apocalyptic references that would merit these same precautions in the states.

Where have the Media hype achieved to improve the situation for the people of Mexico. I have yet to find articles where US reporters have been speaking to people on the ground in Mexican soil, without the use of sensationalized pictures of people with masks and regular officers patrolling the city. (Yes, officers do carry those guns even in days pre Swine Flu).

What damages have these fears contributed to the economies of different regions of Mexico and Baja California. What responsibility can be placed on the media and Americans that have changed their everyday behavior and hurt thousands of people trying to bring in bread and butter to their homes.

What is it in the culture of the US to consistently promote fear and act defensively, and more importantly, who is benefiting from our current panic stricken behaviors. Is this behavior really looking out for the best interest of Americans and other nation’s citizens.

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